A few months ago I had the pleasure of working on a cover image with Kate, editor of Ursinus Magazine. It’s a magazine associated with the small college based out of Collegeville, PA.

When Kate approached me with the article for the cover I was pretty excited. Basically, the article deals with researchers better understanding between the brain, body and showing scientific evidence of the soul. Pretty cool stuff, right?

My first set of sketches tried to use abstraction to show the connectiveness between the body and mind with emphasis on the soul. Kate wasn’t quite sold and wanted me to explore ways to show just the head and the mind. Possibly, with imagery that could relate to memory, music and equation.

There was a moment in the article that talked about how the brain was in a sense built upon a foundation of patterns. So, the top two sketches focused on the hair being a stain glass window of a brain shape with beams of light and fragments falling into place. The bottom two sketches were silhouettes of a patterned brain with imagery in the beams themselves.

Kate liked both sketches and thought that the line drawing of the top two sketches and a real brain with the beams from the bottom were a better solution for the cover.